U.S. Pat. No. 5,727,170 (Mitchell), which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, discloses that the “PLC has a user configurable protocol port attached thereto. Briefly stated, at the PLC communication port or as a result of a user program or I/O event, a special flag bit may be set which thereby allows the communication port to be activated. This is done by the flag bit causing an interrupt to occur in the PLC user program which allows a user to communicate with a user specified protocol scheme rather than the normal communication/programming protocol when this special bit is not set.” See Abstract.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,765,000 (Mitchell), which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, discloses that the “scan cycle in a programmable logic controller is constructed so as to allow the PLC users program to execute an instruction to assign a user program section to which the PLC system is to transfer control upon the occurance of an instruction-specified event. Also allowed is the de-assignment of a user program section from an instruction-specified event. Moreover, the interrupt may happen at any portion of the PLC scan cycle and not merely at compilation time. This thereby allows for dynamically presetting values of characters and the like as well as pipelining of interrupts in the PLC.” See Abstract.